


In the Lonely Cool before Dawn

by rikyl



Category: The Mindy Project
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-07
Updated: 2013-07-07
Packaged: 2017-12-18 00:15:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/873529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rikyl/pseuds/rikyl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>During "Take Me With You," Danny thinks about his feelings for Mindy and breaks up with Christina.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Lonely Cool before Dawn

As Danny watches her inexplicably run out of the hospital room, he has the strangest thought, and yet in that instant, it makes more sense than anything he’s thought in months.

It’s that Mindy is somehow the relationship equivalent of triplets.

No, see—he knows, it makes zero sense, except for that it’s after midnight, and he never got to smoke that cigarette, and her forearm was pressed against his forearm in the cab on the way over here, and they just pulled three human beings out of one womb, and in this moment, it makes sense. She’s like the triplets. She has pushed her way into his life with all this extra noise and activity and chaos, and he doesn’t understand half of what he’s feeling, and it’s inconvenient, and badly timed, and he doesn’t have room. He didn’t ask for this—no one ever asks for triplets—but if that’s what turns up, you don’t send it back either. You make room.

You say yes.

Not that she’s three people. That would actually probably be a really offensive thing to say. She’s Mindy, and she’s not exactly what he ever had in mind, but she’s here, and he wants her in his life, wants her more in his life, and this is happening. He has to let it happen.

Only … he can’t let this happen.

He’s with Christina. _Christina_ , the long-legged goddess who had been haunting his dreams for years and is now here, in the flesh, trying to make it work with him.

So he doesn’t run after Mindy, wherever she’s going. He tries to shove her out of his mind, makes a few more not-quite-necessary stops in the maternity word, and finally, somewhat reluctantly, goes home.

Christina is still awake when he gets back to his—what had he been thinking, _their_ —apartment, and she rolls over when he tries to quietly slide into his side of the bed.

“The triplets okay?” she whispers sleepily.

“Hmm?” For a split second, he thinks she’s onto to what he’s thinking, but no, the actual triplets. “Oh. Yeah … yeah, they’re great.”

“What about Mindy?” she asks next, and he stills.

“Mindy?”

“After the breakup,” Christina clarifies. “That was pretty brutal, in front of everyone. Does she seem okay?”

“Oh. Yeah. Yeah, she seems …” He thinks about the way her eyes focused behind her glasses during surgery, the warmth of her fingers through her latex glove when she’d handed him a scalpel, and he has to remind himself she went through a breakup tonight, not a reprieve. “It’s for the best probably. He wasn’t right for her, right? I mean, a minister, sure, but something … something was off there. And now she can stay. Stay at the practice. So that’s good.”

He trails off self-consciously.

“What about you?”

He’s not sure what she means by that. And god, it’s late. Or early. He looks at the clock, and it’s 1:54 a.m. He wonders where Mindy went when she ran out of the hospital, where she ended up tonight.

“Me?”

“I found a lighter on the floor by the window.”

Danny feels the old wave of defensiveness surge up and tries to tamp it back down.

“I don’t smoke anymore.”

“Yeah, you don’t smoke anymore.” But her voice sounds more defeated than accusatory.

“Not often. Just when … you know, a few here or there, not even a pack a year, tops. It’s a stress thing. I’m quitting. I’m trying to quit.”

“A stress thing,” Christina echoes faintly, and Danny’s annoyance shifts to guilt. Not about the smoking—it really isn’t a frequent habit anymore, and he hadn’t even had the chance to light up tonight—but about the reason he’d felt like hiding in here at all during the party. Christina was back and instead of wanting to be at her side, he’d been looking for an escape.

There’s the sound of the sheets rustling, and then she sits up and flips the bedside light on. “Danny, is this—us—is this working?”

The question takes him by surprise, even though minutes ago he’d been ready to—he’s not sure exactly what—but suddenly, feeling like they might actually be on the brink of it, he’s panicking a little. He sits up and shifts so he’s facing her. The dim light behind her illuminates her halo of blonde hair, and she looks younger, like a ghost of past Christina, the one he’d been in love with. Been in love with—that was the thing. Something twists in his chest as he realizes he’s never going to get that back.

“I don’t know,” he says quietly. “I’ve been trying. I went camping.”

He isn’t trying to convince her of anything. It’s just mystifying—that he’s been doing everything right this time, and it still isn’t working.

“I know, and I appreciate that,” she says, but she looks sad, and tired. “I just wonder if what we’re doing is … it seems like maybe we’re just contorting ourselves into what we think we’re supposed to be.”

“Are you contorting yourself?” Danny really feels like he’s been the one performing acrobatic feats of embracing the outdoors and taking an interest in her photography. What has she been doing?

She spreads her hands and glances aimlessly around the room. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

She is, and he supposes she has a point. If this were the old days, she’d have been on a plane weeks ago, jetting off to the next assignment and trying to pull him along, while he was pushing her to find something stable in the city.

“It shouldn’t be this hard, should it?” The answer is so obvious that the question comes out as rhetorical, and it just hangs in the air between them.

“Maybe we should slow things down,” she says finally.

“Yeah,” he agrees around the lump in his throat.

It’s not exactly a breakup, not in so many words, but he knows her too well and he knows by the tone of her voice that this is over, and he feels it too. No yelling or slamming doors or accusations this time … just quiet resignation about what they don’t have, and it feels all the more final for how dispassionate it is. And if history is any indicator, Christina will find her next assignment and be gone within a few days.

Neither of them say anything for a few minutes. Eventually Christina flips the light off again, and he rolls over away from her toward the window, but he’s unable to sleep, unable to figure out how he should feel right now. He’s a tangle of exhaustion and unrest, relief and regret … but he doesn’t feel as terrible as it seems like he should.

Some time passes, and Christina’s breathing becomes slow and steady so that he can tell she’s fallen asleep. Now that it’s safe, he looks over his shoulder at her, at the stillness of her face in the moonlight, the shape of her body under the sheet, and he tries to memorize it. This is the picture he promises himself he’ll keep of her, to replace the old one that had brought him so much pain. She is lovely, and he cares about her, and there are things he’ll miss about her. But she isn’t for him, and he isn’t for her, and he knows that now.

He rolls away again, his eyes focusing on the open window. A breeze blows a gap between the curtains, just enough that he can see a sliver of night sky above the apartment building across the street. He thinks about the longing he’d felt a few hours ago, sitting next to Mindy after they’d both gone looking for a moment of refuge from the party and found each other.

He’d looked toward that window and felt the irrational urge to go through it, to climb down the fire escape and disappear into the darkness.

He’d had the even more irrational urge to take the hand of the woman sitting next to him and pull her along with him, running off together into the night.

Hours later, as she’s out there somewhere recovering from her actual clumsy escape and he’s laying here coming to terms with his own, it doesn’t seem so irrational.

He dozes off in the wee hours of a new morning, thinking about the touch of her hand, about the open window, about things that feel strange and possible.


End file.
